Installed 5 - DLB2701 radios last year.  All but one have failed.  With one spare left, making plans on replacement radios.   Have never had such a high equipment failure as this.  Have used Freewave radios on other projects for 10 years.  They are more expensive but reliability is vastly superior to what I have experienced with the DLB2701.   I am interested in knowing if the DLB2701 was just a really bad unit.   It has been suggested to replace the DLB2701 radios with the Deliberant Atheros based systems.  I would like to hear that Atheros based radios are a vast improvement over the DLB2701.  Any input on this matter is appreciated.

Bob Whalen

 Bob- I use many DLBs-both legacy and new Atheros based and have had very few problems. 3 lightning damaged (killed the ethernet port) and 1- 2116 that had water intrusion into the RJ 45 connector. So I'd have to say from my experience that the failure rate is pretty low.

That is good to know.   You have had much better luck.    With the high rate of failure I have experienced, as soon as my last spare is used, I need to plan on replacing all DLBs.   

Hi Bob .. I could not help but respond to your dead dlb2700's. I too have about 9 dead units. Over a period of time the units were giving me fits, most did not die immediately. During the process of figuring out where the problem was (because they were intermittent), I finally come to a common denominator, the radios were dying or about  to die. (I lost 6 customers) One unit died during a firmware update.

To make a long story short, Deliberant Service Dept. has not assisted me with any of the radios.  Remedy,-- just buy new radios and 18v power supplies, which costs more than a DLB2-12.  IMHO,They knew that they were manufacturing inferior products until the atheros were available. Sorry for your luck, and if you know of any good use for a 'gutted out' antenna shell, please post it for the benefit of others that have purchased this inferior product.

 Your experience very similar to mine.  In more than 30yrs in control business, have never experienced anything close to such a high rate of equipment failure as these radios.  

 I have 2 2701's out in the field now. One is an AP on a 2700' mountain in some of the most rugged terrain and harshest environment you can imagine. The other is one end of a major ptp link and runs pretty much continuously at 12mbps day in and day out for the last 3 years. Any problems I have had with the 2700s has been blown built in surge suppressors due to lightning strikes. I will say that the newer Atheros radios don't do a real good job of talking to the legacy Realtek radios. I used a CPE-2 for a client linking to the 3 year old 2701 AP on the aforementioned mountain with awful results. The client saw the AP ok, but the AP saw the client with a S/N of 6 to 8. I tweaked the CPE-2 all over creation and at best got a 60% packet los. Gave up and replaced it with a 2300 salvaged radio. Now getting 11mbps throught the link with 0% packet loss. Go figure.